Partner categories had previously been available only via Power Editor, and Facebook said its addition to the ads create tool will give more marketers the opportunity to build audiences around offline actions.

As for the four criteria of core audiences, the social network wrote in the Facebook for Business post:

Location: Say you’re a retailer that wants to show ads to people who live near your brick-and-mortar locations. With flexible location targeting, you can build campaigns around any combination of geographies: country and city (France and London); country and state (Canada and New York); state and city (California and Las Vegas); state and ZIP code (U.S. only); etc. It’s also easier to exclude certain areas — i.e., New York City, except 11211, or the U.K., excluding Cambridge.

Demographic: Trying to boost sales at your flower shop? It’s now easier to reach people who have recently declared their love for someone on Facebook. Core audiences features more values for relationship status (like civil unions and domestic partnerships), as well as timely changes in life events, like getting engaged or married. We’ve also added a level of flexibility long requested by marketers, which allows targeting for people who have gotten engaged or married in the past year, or the past three or six months. Or maybe you’re a recruiter for a law firm and want to specifically advertise to associate attorneys at law firms in New York. Now you can. Core audiences now covers information like workplace and job title, and offers expanded information about education.

Interests: We know that people have a ton of interests, and that marketers want to reach people specifically based on them. So we simplified how you can do this on Facebook by redefining our interest-based targeting segments so that each has one simple meaning. Rather than having multiple targeting options like broad categories and keywords, we developed a new methodology that increases the precision of interest-based targeting by allowing advertisers to simply choose one segment. Now, if you want to reach baseball fans, just choose “baseball” as your targeting segment – it will pull in all of the people who have liked or expressed interest in baseball-related topics on Facebook.

Behaviors: We’re including in core audiences a new targeting option, behaviors, which includes partner categories. This gives marketers the ability to target campaigns to people based on things they purchase and what devices they use. For instance, if you want to reach people interested in music who use iPhones, you’ll use behaviors as part of creating your target audience.

Advertisers: Are you anxious to begin using core audiences and partner categories?